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Ana Roš was on her way to becoming a diplomat. She skied alpine for the Yugoslav junior team, then studied diplomacy in Trieste and had a career mapped out when she met Valter Kramar, whose family ran the Hiša Franko inn in Slovenia's Soča Valley.
She moved there in 2002. When his parents stepped back, she took over the kitchen without a single day of formal training and without ever having worked in a restaurant kitchen. She is entirely self-taught, which is worth keeping in mind when you look at what she has done since.
The place is crucial. Kobarid sits in a valley by the Italian border, surrounded by mountains and the Soča river, which is turquoise and full of trout. During the First World War the front ran straight through the valley and the house was used as a field hospital. Hemingway set A Farewell to Arms here.
The isolation makes sourcing a job in itself. Roš builds the menu around a network of local foragers, cheesemakers and fishermen, with marble trout from the river and tolminc from the mountain pastures. It is not a matter of principle but the only way to work in a valley without food wholesalers.
This is her first book and it is as much autobiography as recipe collection. There are essays on the landscape, on the producers she works with and on what it costs to build something of this calibre in a place that barely exists on the map. Roš appeared in the second season of Chef's Table, was named the world's best female chef in 2017 and Hiša Franko now has two Michelin stars.
This is one of the few chef monographs in which the writing is at least as strong as the photography.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 256
Language: English
First published: 2020
